A great little piece by planetbeing that's been retweeted all over the shop today so I hope he won't mind me posting it up here too.

Apple needs to play cat and mouse with pirates, not jailbreakers

Apple spends considerable engineering resources attempting to defeat jailbreakers, but historically, we have always been able to defeat anything they throw at us. In trying to defeat jailbreakers, Apple is fighting against a body of skilled volunteers who feel morally, ethically and legally justifiable in defeating such efforts, and would go so far as to feel a moral and ethical obligation to continue to do so. It's not only fun to try to work around such puzzles, but basic ethical common sense tells us that it is only right to be able to do whatever we want to devices we purchased as long as we're not hurting anyone else.

None of the people who work to defeat Apple's jailbreaking protections believe that pirating App Store applications is EVER justified. Nor do they believe that Apple should have a support burden for modified devices.

Yet Apple and many developers continue to equate jailbreaking with piracy, which is both unjust and unproductive toward their own interests. Piracy doesn't require jailbreaking. The one modification that jailbreaking makes to the iPhone, to allow applications to run unsigned code, is unnecessary for piracy because pirated apps are already signed!

Third-party app stores have successfully deployed copy protection for the applications they carry. These app stores run on jailbroken iPhones and their DRM remains uncracked. In contrast, official App Store applications carry no significant DRM. They are encrypted, but the encryption can be side-stepped with a method that has worked, and continues to work, completely unmodified, since day 1 of the App Store.

Whereas several new hurdles have cropped up against jailbreakers during this time, Apple has developed none for pirates. Developers concerned with piracy need to ask Apple why they have not spent any time protecting them against piracy, instead, focusing on playing cat and mouse games with skilled and motivated jailbreakers. A cat and mouse game that would not guarantee developers protection even if Apple succeeded.

A similar cat and mouse game with pirates is likely to be much easier for Apple to win. Instead of fighting against people with the most knowledge and the most motivation, Apple would instead be contending against a group of people who are accustomed to using automated scripts (*cough* script kiddies *cough*), and for more complicated jobs using gdb (a debugger). Lord knows what they would do if Apple, say, disabled debugger attachment for encrypted applications, or obfuscated MobileInstallation, or put protections into the kernel. After all, you can't use gdb to attach to the iPhone kernel, can you?

Please, Apple. These suggestions are free. The first one, honestly, is TRIVIAL. Please for goodness' sake, use one of them! You've had a year to do SOMETHING. ANYTHING. I would have made my own anti-piracy patches, but building in DRM by machine language patching an operating system kernel is not fun, and it'd take me twenty times as long to make the same change as you.

Developers: Don't hate on jailbreaking because you think it "enables" App Store piracy. App Store piracy simply wouldn't exist if Apple actually did anything about it instead of being too busy losing games with jailbreakers instead.

Apple restricts the access to the iPod/iPhone so they have a monopol when it comes to installing software and downloading music and movies. Furthermore they can decide which software gets approved and thus they can disable competitors (see Opera). Keeping this monopol is far more important to them than the few bucks they lose due to pirated software.

Apple restricts the access to the iPod/iPhone so they have a monopol when it comes to installing software and downloading music and movies. Furthermore they can decide which software gets approved and thus they can disable competitors (see Opera). Keeping this monopol is far more important to them than the few bucks they lose due to pirated software.

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They don't want an Atari incident. No one (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo) does.

Why do people think Apple has some huge force against Jailbreaking? What exactly are these "huge efforts" to prevent jailbreaking? If anyone here really thinks that Apple couldn't stop jailbreaking, they're fooling themselves. We're not dealing with some small time company that's run out of a basement. This is Apple. If they wanted jailbreaking to go away, they could make it happen.

The reality here, is that jailbreaking sells iPhones and iPod Touches. I know I bought mine for that one reason. If it weren't for jailbreaking, I'd have bought something else. I have friends that have done the same, and I'm sure there are a lot of people here that have done the same. To think that Apple is ignorant of this, and is just willing to throw away a good portion of sales because a few users try to pirate appstore apps? Please. Apple would rather loose a few pennies on an app than loose $200+ from an iPod Touch not being sold.

@Maker_of_Noise: Unfortunately, you are incorrect. It has become clear that Apple is (sadly) unconvinced by arguments that jailbreaking helps them sell more products and moves against jailbreaking with both serious legal and technical challenges.

On the technical side, they are and always have been actively investing quite a bit of engineering time in attempting to defend against jailbreaking. I can't discuss their latest efforts, but the long history includes a substantial update to bootloader codesign protection for s5l8720, img3 itself, removal of device node and symlink support in afc, otherwise superfluous partition checks during restore, etc. I am not including in that list any patch that could possibly be interpreted as a security measure against malware or bug fix. Basement company or not, they have tried and they have failed.

No disrespect to Apple, but no company "if they wanted to", can snap their fingers and just stop things like jailbreaking. Similar protections on every single game console has been broken so far, and game console producers are not interested in the only two possible outcomes: piracy or third-party development that do not pay hefty royalties to them.

The third way Apple is trying to end jailbreaking is the best way: They are developing features to fill in the gap and lessening the temptation of jailbreaking to gain needed features. Even so, I would still contend that jailbreaking ought to remain a legitimate option to anyone who wishes to do so, for freedom and fair competition reasons.

Most people who jailbrake do it for cracked apps. You can deny it all you want, but you know dam well they do. Most will lie through their ass and try to sound morally righteous and talk sh*t about how wrong it is and that they would never do it, but actually do. I bet you money if Apple found a way to prevent cracked apps once and for all there would be a lot less jailbraking, and people would lose interest in it.

Most people who jailbrake do it for cracked apps. You can deny it all you want, but you know dam well they do. Most will lie through their ass and try to sound morally righteous and talk sh*t about how wrong it is and that they would never do it, but actually do. I bet you money if Apple found a way to prevent cracked apps once and for all there would be a lot less jailbraking, and people would lose interest in it.

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I jailbroke before, now, and will continue to, and [PIRACY]us will never find its way onto my device. I pay for my apps, pay for my music, and pay for my movies.

If Apple was so smart, why don't they just hard-encode the MobileInstallation file onto the iPod or something? Or even better, integrate sigchecks into iTunes. Or are those two suggestions physically impossible?

There are a lot of ways to look at this problem and the way apple looks at it is that jailbreaking = piracy... but I still think that if you want to *hack* any device you own... no one should be against it, since you paid for it. Apple could stop jailbreaking in a lot of other ways... like maybe adding things that jailbreaking allows you to do... For example themes. I don't really think there's a firmware that any experienced dev teams can't jailbreak...